The entire NA1 server went to war on Friday, here is just one video of some of the fighting. More about all of this in a bit, but I think to a man everyone agrees that night was the most fun anyone has had in DF, period. Enjoy.
(DarkFall-related post disclaimer/reminder. If you click the image link near the top-right of this page and buy a DarkFall account, I get paid 20% of the client cost. If you believe this taints my views and reporting on DarkFall, your opinion is wrong.)
We have a new blogger in our midst (thanks for the link KTR), and his first post is so good that I’ve already added him to my daily list of sites to visit (feed readers are for nerds). The post is about the pricing model for MMO games, with the basic idea being that while games and gamers have changed since 1997, the standard model for selling an MMO has not. Good stuff, especially the microtransation parts. While I avoid MMOs with that pricing model when possible, I’ve spent my share of cash in the iPhones app store, and it IS a model that can work in the right environment and with the right execution.
The one part I do disagree with however is at what price to sell the ‘boxed’ (in-store or virtual) game at launch. If you have been a part of any new MMO launch, you know the first few days/weeks/months are more or less a clusterfuck of overpopulation, server queues, unexpected downtime, and the devs going “zomg we never though this many people would be interested in our game!” In short, your game is NEVER going to look worst from a functional standpoint than the first month, so why would you want to expose MORE people to that by lowering the entry cost?
Furthermore, the core audience that has been following your game for months/years is already sold, even at $50, so dropping the price won’t help you attract them; they are already in. Now assuming your game is not outright terrible, that core should be big enough to fill out the server(s) on launch day, and only after some of those players decide the game is not for them would you really need to bring in less-dedicated fans. It’s at this point that you drop your initial cost and lower the barrier of entry. The better your product, the more growth you will experience, rather than seeing a steady or negative rotation of new players coming in as older ones leave.
The huge bonus out of keeping the initial cost high is that by the time you lower the price, you have also (hopefully) improved your game and ironed out all launch-day issues. Now those less-dedicated players who are coming in are going to see your game in a much better light than they would have on day one, and are more likely to stick around. If they quit a week after go-live (hi tourists), they are more likely to share their negative impressions around their community, further hurting future sales.
And since an MMO is a marathon rather than the sprint race sale of a single player game, you don’t need (or want, really) a huge initial rush of buyers. Not only is this expensive in terms of marketing, it’s also self-defeating for all of the launch-related issues already mentioned. As such, a higher barrier of entry initially is actually a good thing for everyone but those initial buyers (but that is an excepted price that is paid by those on the bleeding edge of anything, and even they benefit by having a smoother launch), and again, if you have a quality product, in time your numbers will grow.
edit: I forgot to mention that in addition to the above, IMO the better solution to lowering the box price outright is to offer better incentives for long-term commitments. Something like “if you buy a lifetime sub for $200, you get the boxed game free”, or “if you buy the game and 6 months of time, the price of the game itself goes from $50 to $20 (this is currently the DF promotion FYI). In addition to giving people a better deal, you also get them for a longer period of time, meaning they are less likely to ragequit after one bad week. Depending on your game, that first week might be a far bigger hurdle than even the initial cost (DF and EVE jump out in this regard).
In a move I’ve been planning for some time now, last night I sold all of my rare ore/ingots for the total price of 130,000 gold, effectively doubling my current gold stash. The trade itself was done at the Sanguine bank (human capital city), and I’ll admit I was a bit paranoid as the trade was happening that something bad would happen. Luckily nothing but the trade went down, and I got my money without incident.
I have a few reasons for making the sale, chief among them the belief that in the next patch/expansion, rare ores won’t be as rare, and prices will decrease. Currently on the NA server rare ore goes for 1,500 gold or more, which makes using weapons/armor that require the ore extremely expensive. Aventurine has hinted that rare ore might have a chance to drop from regular ore nodes, and if that happens then without a doubt prices will drop. Even if that is not the change implemented, I fully believe SOMETHING will be done to make rare ores available to those without city/hamlet mines.
The other reason I made the sale is I don’t really have a use for the ore, at least not in any practical manner. The ore is used to craft rank 50+ weapons and bows, along with Full Plate and better armor, and things like cannons/warhulks. Full Plate I can acquire from Shadow Knights (not as good as crafted, but still decent), or I can farm the Selentine Golem on Yssam to get the ore I need. For PvE rank 40 weapons and crafted scale/plate is more than enough, and I have stockpiled enough rank50+ gear to last quite a while for PvP. Plus my average-at-best player skills don’t warrant bringing out things like rank70s and Infernal/Dragon armor anyway.
My goal for all this cash is to buy a placed house in a decent village to set up a player vendor. As I’ve mentioned a few times, I’ve come close, but for one reason or another I’ve never been able to make the purchase. Now with a healthy bank roll, hopefully that will happen shortly. The other option is to buy a housing deed of some sort and hope a village spot become available, but IMO that right now is a riskier and more long-term solution.
(DarkFall-related post disclaimer/reminder. If you click the image link near the top-right of this page and buy a DarkFall account, I get paid 20% of the client cost. If you believe this taints my views and reporting on DarkFall, your opinion is wrong.)
As previously mentioned, the resident lucky bastard in Inquisition, Megummi, found a Villa deed inside a chaos chest recently, and last night five of us set out to find a spot to place it. Four epic hours, miles of Agon traveled, a mini-graveyard of victim tombstones, and a few casualties later, victory was ours.
The journey started up in Yssam where everyone but me was bound, and as the four went south to join up at my location in human lands (still questing), I spotted four players near me farming some Hill Giants. What’s a little PvP to start our trip off right, eh. The four arrive and we charge the mob farmers, fully expecting them to put up a fight (5v4 is about as fair a fight as you can expect in DF, and all but Megummi and I are somewhat freshly rolled characters), but instead of fighting they all turn to run. We quickly took down the one guy slowest to flee, and pursued his two other buddies (the fourth mounted up and rode away in a different direction, smart guy) into the nearby water. Some quick aqua-archery and soon enough two more tombstones pop up. Some decent loot was grabbed and our night was off to a good start.
As we continued riding, one of our members got disconnected at just the wrong moment (in water), which meant he was back in Yssam when he logged in. Down to four.
We scouted three villages in human lands without spotting a single open house slot of any kind, much less a Villa spot, and this was only the start of what would be a trend for the night. Just as we were leaving human lands and heading into Alfar territory, we spotted two players riding towards us and engaged. To our surprise they fought back rather than running away, and even though the fight started as a 2v4 it was no cakewalk.
One of the two in particular was a heavy-hitter (the other guy was no slouch either), and managed to take one of our newer guys down with a little help from some friendly fire. The fight was basically split 1v2 and 1v2. The enemy I was fighting was still mounted, and although we managed to kill his first mount rather quickly, he spawned a second and managed to stall us for a good amount of time. As this was happening the other enemy managed to down and gank one member of our group before he himself was killed. Not the best result in a 2v4 situation, but we still managed to loot and bank everything, so the only thing lost was a bit of pride. Down to three.
After scouting another three village in Alfar lands without seeing a single open spot, a bit of doubt began to creep in. We knew housing spots in villages were hard to come by, but we were not expecting it to be THIS difficult. We still had three villages to check in Maharim lands, and it’s always fun to return to your former homeland (That was Inquisition’s area during our time on the EU server).
After visiting yet another full village, we stopped by an NPC city that we frequented back in the day, and much to our delight found four gatherers just outside of zap tower range. Megummi, being a blue-con Orc, was able to enter the city without getting zapped, which would prove to be very helpful. We started by quickly mount killing two harvesters before they even had a chance to move (mount attacks vs naked gatherers = damage cap hits), and luckily for us they were both loaded. The other two gatherers were a bit closer to tower range, close enough that melee was not possible, but not far enough that we could not bow them down. A few machine-gunned arrows later, two more tombstones full of harvested goods popped up, ready for Megummi to loot and bank. Guess the harvesters in the area don’t get many PKs and were a little over-confident with all that loot.
With our spirits raised a bit, we set out to hit our old hamlet and the one near it, properties were we spent countless hours in and around on EU. Our hamlet was quite, but the other hamlet had a few active players running around. We rode in and took out a couple, and I ended up chasing one guy a little too close to the local NPC city. The zap tower started hitting me just as the locals began to pour out, newbie gear in hand, arrows flying (wildly, thank god). Between all the incoming damage, I was down to literally a sliver of life as I tried to ride away, and was only saved by chugging a health pot. Without it, I would have been knocked off my mount and sent home. Crazy, crazy close call.
With the rabble still pursuing us on foot, we decided it was time to stop messing around and get back to the business of finding a home. After yet another full village, we had only one left to check, and spirits were rather grim, not only because of the lack of open spots but also because it was getting late, and everyone was growing a bit tired.
The final village was on an island a bit off the western coast of Agon, so it was somewhat fitting that we all had to mount-swim at a slower pace to reach what we were sure would be yet another disappointment. Slow death and all that. Yet as we entered the village, I brought my view over one placed house only to see “A Villa” pop up instead of a player name. Success, someone had not paid their taxes and got evicted! Not only was this the first open spot of any kind out of all the villages we visited, but it was the exact size that we needed. After almost four hours, the relief and joy of finding this spot was amazing.
Of course, now we had to get to a bank in order for Megummi to retrieve his deed and actually place the house (it would have been crazy to ride around this entire time with something worth over 100k on us). Our options were to ride back to that NPC city we had just visited, or to a hamlet that was much closer to the south. Being late, hamlet was the decision.
As we got close to the hamlet, we saw there was a bit of activity, but nothing overly intimidating. We rode in, taking fire from two hamlet zap towers, and spotted one geared player and another two naked. I got a few good mounted shots in on the geared player, but before I could finish him off he ran up into a tree house (this was an elf-style hamlet). While this was happening, the two naked players were doing their best harassing us, taking shots at our mounts and generally being a pain. With mounts and our own health getting a little low, we decided to ride out.
Once we were a safe distance from the hamlet, we debated if we should try again, this time doing a quick hit and run so Megummi can grab his deed, or just forget it and head to the NPC city. Again, being late, I voted to try for the ninja grab, and so the third member of our group crouch-walked back in to scout the situation. The report was that the geared player was recalling out, and so as soon as that happened, we went in. Unfortunately another geared member was hiding among the buildings and managed to quickly nuke our scouting member down thanks to a well placed wall of force (basically a force bubble that keeps you from moving away for 3-5 seconds). Three other players were also in the hamlet, and although they only had newbie gear on, their bows were enough to drive us out before we could risk getting the deed. Down to two.
A bit frustrated, Megummi and I rode to the NPC city, grabbed his deed, and began the ride back to the village. At this point our nerves were more or less shot, and all we could do was pray that we did not cross a group of players on our way to the village. Each little environmental sound was cause for terror (mobs spawning and casting spells, wildlife running around), and as we made the final swim to the village we were basically spent.
Luckily the final moments were uneventful, and Megummi claimed the villa as his own. We (Inq) now have a western spot to recall to in Agon, as the villa allows the owner and one friend to recall to the house. This recall is separate from the normal city/clan stone bind. This means we can rotate house friends and get a group to recall to the house, and rather than crossing all of Agon to PvP in elf or Maharim lands, or to attend some siege on that side of the world, all we have to do is use the house.
My guess is one of our first trips will be to pay that hamlet to the south a little visit, plus they have a mine we would not mind getting some rare ore out of. Good times, definitely good times.
(DarkFall-related post disclaimer/reminder. If you click the image link near the top-right of this page and buy a DarkFall account, I get paid 20% of the client cost. If you believe this taints my views and reporting on DarkFall, your opinion is wrong.)
Two DarkFall items for today. First up, there is an extensive Q&A up at MMORPG.com about DarkFall from Paragus Rants. The questions where all submitted by players on the DF forums, and surprisingly all questions that followed the rules were at least addressed by Aventurine.
As always some questions got the ol’ “we have plans for that”, “we are working on that”, “that’s been discussed”, but there is also a lot of good information contained as well. Between doubling the number of items in the game (which includes greatly expanding crafting options), adding DX11 support, armor dyes, scavenging (breaking down items into raw mats), and what sounds like a UI overhaul, 2010 will be a busy year for DF players. The big unknown out of all of this of course is WHEN any of this will happen. The plan is to release something called DarkFall 2010 (hopefully not the final name), but hopefully that’s more February/March 2010 and not November 2010. Regardless, the Q&A offers up a lot of information and insight behind some of the ‘why’ in DF, and is definitely worth a read.
The second item I wanted to talk about is my updated impressions on player vendors, having now seen a few of them in villages and with the community having some time to get things rolling. The good news is that player vendors show up on your minimap when you are close, making them easier to spot when passing by a village. They also look great, with the little old man pacing back and forth in his booth. He also has a few funny things to say to you in public chat as you inspect his inventory and make purchases. Player vendor deeds also seem to finally be dropping in price, and I’m seeing more and more of them in the villages I come across.
There are a few issues however, chief among them the inability to see the full details of an item you are about to buy. Currently the only information available is the item’s name and short description, meaning you can’t see the items actual stats or durability. Since crafted items can vary in power (especially transmuted weapons), and with durability being such a key aspect in value, buying something ‘blind’ off a vendor is currently very risky. Players who are serious about running a reputable vendor will only sell quality goods, but any random player could put an item with one durability left on his vendor and charge full price, hoping to scam some unsuspecting buyer.
There is also the more general issue of a player actually using his vendor. I’ve come across a few now that are empty, which makes them seem like a waste of space, and might discourage players from checking the inventory of other vendors. Players who are truly serious in running a vendor have made forum posts to inform buyers of their location, inventory, and future goals, but as we all know only a percentage of your player base reads the forums, and player vendors should be something that is useful to all players in Agon.
A member of Inquisition was recently lucky enough to find a Villa house deed, and assuming we can find a decent spot to place it, perhaps I’ll attempt to buy my own vendor deed and run a shop myself. I currently have enough gold to buy one at a reasonable price, and my crafting skills are high enough that I could offer some decent items for sale. The other option would be to purchase a house myself, and I came close to buying a cottage with a vendor already placed just last week, although sadly the final price was beyond what I could afford. I’m certainly in the market however, and I always keep my eye on the trade channel hoping to spot a deal.
Certainly more on housing and player vendors as the opportunities present themselves.
Before this goes any further, I want to clear up a few things. I don’t hate Tobold. I only know him about as well as some of you, which is through reading his blog over the last few years and email back and forth occasionally. I don’t intend to destroy, tear down, or discredit him or his blog. What would I gain from that, considering I enjoy reading what he writes?
Tobold and I have different style of writing and communicating. We don’t debate in the same way, we don’t share the same sense of humor, and different things ‘trigger’ us. We also have very different tastes in MMO games; we see value in different features/systems, and what’s slightly green to him looks kinda blue to me. I’m UO, he is EQ. I’m PvP, he is PvE (stolen from Randomessa, thanks).
I’m overly sarcastic, argue to argue, and at times even manage to write before I think (it’s a gift). I exaggerate sometimes to make a point, usually for the sake of comedy, but sadly sometimes this derails the point I’m actually trying to make. I blame the internet for that one. I’m passionate to a fault about silly stuff (that would be MMO games), and while I never take what’s written on this blogs or others as a personal attack at ME, I do care about the perception of “SynCaine”, especially when I feel an unjust shot is being taken. My e-rep must be defended, and I have my own personal style in defending it. (I find it funny, other opinions may differ) (My perception of ‘unjust’ might be different than yours as well).
I’m not perfect (yet), nor is Tobold. We both make factual mistakes when talking about games (try to write as often as we do and always get everything 100% correct), sometimes those facts bother one of us more than the other. What I view as critical he might not, and a big deal to him might be a minor fix to me. It’s also common that something might look as a positive to him, while I view it as a negative, or vice versa.
What I DON’T want to see happening is either of our blogs changing because of a disagreement, or the blogosphere as a whole becoming less entertaining because someone’s feelings got hurt. No one wins in that situation. Tobold removing comments from his blog would be a shame, not because I want people to continue attacking him, but because that comments section was often a great source of ideas and discussion. Even his switch to moderation has had a negative impact on that (IMO), and again at the end of the day we (blog readers looking to be entertained) end up screwed.
So in an effort to stop this from escalating further and causing more damage, I want to say that I apologize for offending you Tobold, because I know you get triggered by certain things and rather than debate you, I know I can instead derail you with my style of writing. I have a habit of poking someone with a stick until they snap, and more-or-less that’s the case here. You are easy to provoke in that way, and taking advantage of that fact was a poor move on my part.
Instead of this silly ‘war’ continuing (blog wars can only happen on Friday btw, for just this reason), hopefully we can both step back, calm down, and continue any debates of carebear vs pwnzor issues that arise in a more civil manner? I’ll try to filter out any direct shots at you and stick to the topic at hand (which requires a herculean editing effort mind you!), and you try to take what I and other internet trolls write without taking it so personal, so you don’t need to filter your blog or remind people about the TOS, deal?
First off, if you are going to address someone, don’t be cowardly and do it anonymously, if for no other reason than to keep your readers from having to decode what you are talking about. Just trying way, way too hard here. If you’ve made up your mind to ‘take a stand’ and not read something, don’t then pretend you just happened to come across something and make a #3000th post about it. I mean come on now, really? What’s next, fingers in ears screaming ‘na na na na I can’t hear you’?
And it’s not like this topic is something new or unique to the MMO genre, even if you toss in a bad analogy to try and make your point. What makes following a sports team so much fun? Rivalries. What do Red Sox fans think of Yankee fans? They suck. What do Redskin’s fans think of Cowboy fans? They suck. Duke fans opinion of North Carolina? They suck. If you had a Sega Genesis, your opinion of the SNES? It sucks. PS3 or Xbox360? Wii. Apple eaters opinion of banana fans? Who really cares.
And that’s the point, without rivalries, without passion, without being, wait for it, a fan, you miss out on a large part of what it means to be part of something. How many of you watch a sporting event between two teams you don’t root for? How memorable is a last-second score when you don’t have a rooting interest in either team?
Constantly being on the sideline and thinking everyone is ‘just neat’ is selling yourself short. Pick a side, get invested, and enjoy all aspects of it. Accept that when your team/console/game is terrible, everyone will half-cheer for the lovable loser while you wallow in misery. Accept that when your team/console/game is on top or doing well, everyone will hate you while you are riding high. It comes with the territory, and in many ways the more people hate, the more indication you have that you are doing something great.
Would anyone be calling WoW McWoW if it had 20k subs? Of course not, because then it would be ‘just another fantasy themepark MMO’. But those millions of subs mean people are going to hate, whether it’s justified or irrational. If DarkFall had launched and fizzled like so many other niche MMOs, would people still continue to hate its existence today? Somehow I doubt it.
Being invested in something is not some “outdated tribal thinking”, it’s called being a fan. And if you don’t like people yelling “Yankees suck” in your direction, don’t go into Fenway Park with your NY Yankees hat on. If you get so easily offended at someone disagreeing with you, don’t put your opinion up on a blog for the world to read and comment on.
Over the weekend I did a lot of questing and PvE in DarkFall, all spurred by one title quest turn in. And I had a blast, getting to see the new quest content Aventurine added since release and seeing how it plays out from the perspective of a fairly developed character. It also made me realize that you don’t need to drastically change up the familiar ‘kill ten rats’ formula to make questing interesting, you instead can just place those quests in an interesting and exciting environment.
On Friday night I was 160 hobgoblin kills away from finishing the third and final stage of my strength title quest, and so I went to a fast-spawning spot of grunt and veteran hobgoblins and began my mass slaughter. The advantage of this spot was neither mob was particularly difficult for me when wearing decent armor (scale/plate) and using a rank40 greatsword, and the timing worked out that as soon as I was done looting and skinning the last tombstone, a new mob would spawn.
For whatever reason, I felt particularly ‘grindy’ that night, and all 160 hobgoblins were killed in one trip and the title quest was completed. However in order to turn it in I had to travel back to the human starting area, a lengthy ride south from our normal home of Yssam. As I was riding down an NPC name popped up on my mini-map just on the boarder of orc/human territory, and so I took a small detour and went to see what he offered. He had two quests available, and one was to kill Swamp Hags.
Swamp Hags are of interest to me because they skin for hag hearts, and those are used for upper tier blood crafting. The other quest asked me to kill some Doom spiders, which happen to be close to the Swamp Hags. The nice bonus of questing in DarkFall is that when the quest is active, the target location or mob is marked on your map like in many other MMOs. The key difference here is that in DarkFall sometimes finding the right mob or mob camp is a challenge itself due to the size of Agon, and so having a quest show you a Swamp Hag spawn is a very nice bonus, and a great way to become familiar with the local spawns.
Of course, once those two quests were complete and I had gathered a small supply of hag hearts (with the full intention of coming back at a later time to farm more), turning those two quests in opened up a few more, and this little trend continued for 3-4 rounds. The final quest at this time was to visit another NPC location; the now-famous breadcrumb quest style. At this point I was pulled in by the lore and story going and figured I might as well see this to completion, so I bound myself to one of the NPC cities, turned in my title quest, and went off to continue questing.
I’d also like to mention that the lore behind DarkFall is often overlooked because the games primary focus is PvP. Actually reading the quest text was enjoyable, and at times even helps explain certain locations in the world. For instance, one of the quests talked about a town that is now abandoned because it was sieged by some elves. The quest sets you out to kill said elves camped near the town, along with destroying their siege supplies, but the lore itself explains just why you have a town in Agon that is devoid of any NPCs. Without the back-story, you could easily just assume those buildings are another under-populated area of DF. Another quest had me retrieve a lost amulet from deep within a cave. While just outside there is an NPC spawn, the cave itself is ‘empty’ save for the box holding the amulet, which you can only interact with if you have that particular quest. Without it, it becomes just another ‘cave with nothing inside’.
This highlighted another difference between the more open-ended world of DF versus a themepark like WAR. In WAR, anytime you come across anything of interest, you can safely assume it’s a quest target location, and you know you can pick that quest up from the local ‘quest hub’ in that zone. For me this dulled the ‘areas of interest’ because nothing was a surprise, you never discovered anything because all of these supposed exotic locations were all conveniently placed on each step of your path to the level cap.
On the other hand, even something as simple as a chest in a cave was somewhat of an ‘ah ha’ moment in DF, because while I had passed that cave and countless others like it before, now this one cave and box in particular were of special interest to me, and it was all completely optional. It truly felt more like exploring and discovering something, which was a great change of pace.
The other aspect that separates questing in DF from other games is that you are doing it in Agon, which means that while you might have your mind on a quest objective, someone else might be out looking to gank you. You can’t just ‘not PvP’ and hyper-focus on questing, and while out questing you might get your fair share of PvP. This happened to me multiple times, and since I was a decently skilled character in a starter area, more than once I was actually able to chase down and kill the would-be PK hoping for some easy noob kills.
At other times I would run across an enemy clan member, which meant that we could fight even within an NPC town. This gets rather tricky with other players around, as the enemy clan member is orange to you, but everyone else is blue, and one wrong swing will turn you gray and get you tower zapped. Most of the time, after a bit of sparing, we would both decide to play nice and not risk a ‘cheap’ death from a tower, only to have the dozen or so randoms loot our tombstone anyway.
Regardless of the situation or your intentions, you can rest assure that you always have to keep your head on a swivel in Agon, and that even the simplest quest might turn into a massive brawl.
(DarkFall-related post disclaimer/reminder. If you click the image link near the top-right of this page and buy a DarkFall account, I get paid 20% of the client cost. If you believe this taints my views and reporting on DarkFall, your opinion is wrong.)
True story time, gather round.
I get a pingback email about this post linking me, go check it out, disagree mildly, and then notice that the two automatically generated posts by WordPress are both from my blog about the tourist topic (that’s been covered here a few times, just in case you are new around here), including one with the title “WoW tourists are good for the MMO industry”.
Now the scary thing about writing a blog daily is that sometimes, what you write one day/month/year no longer applies at a later date. Change/ feelings/ emo and all that. So now I’m thinking “crap, I must have argued the other side of this topic at one point, this can’t be good” (but would not be the first time. This tends to happen when sometimes you disagree for the sake of disagreeing, ask my fiancé), and then I clicked the link and went to the post.
Fuck I’m funny.
I’ve not downloaded it yet, but for under $12 this just seems like a complete steal for anyone who is a turn-based strategy fan, especially if you liked the Heroes of Might and Magic series. Given that I’ve played HoMM3 longer than a few MMOs, this was an easy purchase for me. Get it while you can if you are interested.
Hardcore Casual 